[...] to draw search traffic—including the New York Times, Huffington Post, and USAtoday. Even the Associated Press is hatching a topic page strategy (despite that earlier this year they complained loudly about [...]

[...] YouTube Emphasizes Search In New Design http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/how-the-associated-press-will-try-to-rival-wikipedia-in-search-resu... [...]

[...] the AP has finally figured out the potential of a system like this. The Nieman Journalism Lab reports that the organization plans “to build ‘news guide landing pages’ that will aggregate the [...]

[...] Wikipedia Maar waar ga je te rade als je iets over de achtergronden bij de actualiteit wilt weten en je hebt niet de luxe op een redactie vol experts te werken? Tik een willekeurig onderwerp in bij Google en je vindt het antwoord bij de eerste tien resultaten: Wikipedia. Volgens Thompson gebruiken veel mensen de online encyclopedie niet alleen als naslagwerk, maar ook voor het volgen van het nieuws. Zij verkiezen de helder vormgegeven combinatie van achtergrond en actualiteit boven de brij aan berichten op nieuwssites. Niet voor niets proberen persbureaus en kranten de formule van Wikipedia te kopiëren. [...]

[...] “our own self-referring network.” That could have something to do with the AP’s plans for topic pages to rival Wikipedia in search results. After his speech, Curley added, “The programs that [...]

[...] see some attempts at this, check out Times Topics from the New York Times and also see how AP is looking at doing something similar. For a smaller example, look at Columbia Tomorrow, a project from Matt Thompson at the Reynolds [...]

[...] go away. It does mean that a lot of them go away. Syndication makes no sense in a world of URLs, as the AP is realizing, so they’re saying you can send the traffic to us, instead of us sending the stories to you. [...]

[...] google, seo Felix Salmon é um cara lúcido pra caralho, como vc pode ver nesse post acerca da tentativa da AP de se posicionar melhor nas buscas do Google: PageRank isn’t a dumb algorithm; it’s a smart [...]

[...] month, I wrote about how The Associated Press plans to leverage its network of members and customers with [...]

[...] Associated Press Tries to Catch up with Wikipedia in the SERPs: In an attempt to make up some ground with Wikipedia, the Associated Press is doing something the New York Times did last year: aggregate content around subject areas in order to make topical roll up pages more competitive on higher volume search terms.  [...]

[...] Associated Press Tries to Catch up with Wikipedia in the SERPs: In an attempt to make up some ground with Wikipedia, the Associated Press is doing something the New York Times did last year: aggregate content around subject areas in order to make topical roll up pages more competitive on higher volume search terms.  [...]

[...] Associated Press Tries to Catch up with Wikipedia in the SERPs: In an attempt to make up some ground with Wikipedia, the Associated Press is doing something the New York Times did last year: aggregate content around subject areas in order to make topical roll up pages more competitive on higher volume search terms.  [...]

[...] How The Associated Press will try to rival Wikipedia in search results » Nieman Journalism Lab "The landing pages were first mentioned at the AP’s annual meeting in April, but further details haven’t emerged until now. In material distributed to some members last month, the news guide is described as “a central location to which headlines, promotional products and other content developed by AP could point.” What that will mean in practice is similar to what you find in the digital content of other news organizations: All references in AP articles to, say, Bill Clinton would link to the landing page with aggregated content and other material about the former president. [...]

I run the SEO for Tribune (btw, thanks for the link to the Barack Obama topic page). That means I run it for about 70 domains now including latimes.com, chicagotribune.com, baltimoresun.com, orlandosentinel.com, sun-sentinel.com and a couple dozen TV station websites like ktla.com, wpix.com, wgntv.com, etc. In addition to that we have several vertical sites like zap2it.com.

So . . . my point here is that I deal with a large network of really powerful sites in regards to PageRank, link strength, domain age, authority, content credibility, etc.. Unfortunately, I also deal with a significant duplicate content problem (it’s a Content Management System problem, I’m trying to fix and I will–in the short term). If you take a look at the following search results you will see where a story published by the Chicago Tribune has been copied to 2,740 different URLs (yes, two thousand seven hundred forty) different URLs.

Look for yourself…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&q=inurl:chi-michelle-obama-dress-story&start=10&sa=N&filter=0

Now, if you are an SEO stop laughing (or crying) and if you aren’t continue to listen for a bit longer as I prove why the AP strategy won’t work as well as they expect.

If you look at any of the 2,740 dupes (there you go laughing again) you will note that there are several ‘inline’ links to other Topic pages in that story. But . . . none of them (at least none if you put the &pws=0 in the URL, which wipes out ‘Personalized Web Search’) show up on the first page of Google. They do okay, 2nd page . . .

Hmmm. Why is that? Well, here’s why. It’s duplicate content. Google knows this . . . how do we know they know this? Well, when you hit the URL below you will find that there are only two results.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=inurl%3Achi-michelle-obama-dress-story&pws=0

What happened to the other 2,700 or so? Oh, they removed them from the results because they were duplicates.

As much as I wish that all my duplicate content pages (which, I agree it’s horrible to have duplicate content pages–I said I’m fixing it) would pass PageRank back to the other links in the content like the non-dupes do, the truth of the matter is they don’t.

They are, what used to be called, ’supplemental results’. Google got rid of the supplemental index a few years ago (darn us SEOs making their life more difficult) but these results are in there. Why? Well because no user wants to see the same content 2,740 times.

So, Google will simply see that there are 10,000 of copies of the same content out there and that it is all linking to the same locations and . . . discredit (or significantly minimize) the ‘quality’ and ‘authority’ of those links.

Here’s the funniest part though. Since they have now started charging bloggers by number of words quoted for an AP story instead of letting people freely link to their stories or use their stories in blurbs (like normal people do, wink), blurbs where it is part of a page that IS unique content, they have managed to cut off the best stream of links to their sites and their content. Talk about cutting off their foot at the neck . . . bad strategy. You WANT links to you AP and you WANT people to blurb your content. Sure, not steal the whole story but use a blurb of it is a really good thing. Look up ‘citation rank’ sometime or call Josh/Abe at Google News or look up what Google just said at SES San Jose in their Google News presentation. Again, not a wise move.

Now let’s point out one more thing. You’d think that my placement on the first page for ‘Barack Obama’ (again thanks for the link) would drive a TON of traffic right? I mean, afterall, Barack is not only the leader of the free world but he’s also a bit of celebrity too (admit, he is). But I’ll release some proprietary information here and tell everyone that we receive 7,855 visits to all of our sites for the keyphrase ‘barack obama’ in July. Why? Because we aren’t #1 for the query. Plus, people don’t search like that. People don’t search for ‘Chicago’ very few search for ‘Chicago News’ (though we did receive 25,387 visits for that term in July, but we ARE number one for that term including site links). Some may say that IS a lot of traffic. It’s not…we receive over a million visits per day, from just Google. How? It’s about the long tail. What’s that? Ranking well on hundreds of thousands of longer keyphrases (3-4 word queries). Plus, I’ll admit other things that I’m not going to mention (no need to increase the comepetition).

So why am I saying this? Afterall AP is a competitor right? Trust me. I know the type. I could prove to them a thousand different ways that this is just silly and they wouldn’t listen. They have made up their mind.

End rant. ;-)

Brent D. Payne
Director, SEO
Tribune Company
@BrentDPayne